Teaching My Mom How to Say 'I Love You'

I had just started college in New York, and for the first time, there was enough space between us for me to miss her. I called her often, just to hear her voice. We’d talk about her day, and I’d listen to her prattle on about the neighbors, or about a new recipe she wanted to try. She’d tell me about her garden; about the budding lemon tree she’d bought and how she’d tied pieces of tin foil to the branches to scare the birds away. Eventually, she’d run out of things to say; and after a few minutes, I’d remember she was still on the phone.

"I’m going to go," I’d say. "Bye, Mom. I love you."

"OK," she’d say, before putting the phone down and forgetting to hang up.

"Love" is not a word that comes easily for my mom. It is awkward in her mouth; heavy and out of place. This is partly cultural — for her, an abundant use of "I love you" feels as American as baseball and apple pie. Having grown up in Hong Kong, she was taught a different, less affectionate type of parenting; and, from a young age, I learned that my mom would never be the type to coo and coddle.

"How do you say ‘I love you’ in Cantonese?" I asked her once.

"You don’t," she said. "There are no words for it."

This never bothered me until I moved a few thousand miles away. Prying the words out of her mouth began to feel like a challenge. I became desperate for vocal affection; convinced that hearing her proclaim her love would make it more tangible, that it would make it real.

My freshman year of college was a lonely one, and I isolated myself as much as I possibly could. I rarely left my dorm room, often skipping meals or stockpiling cereal from the cafeteria for the days I didn’t want to venture outside.

At times, it felt like my only connection to the outside world was my mom’s voice, hearing her impassioned (and, frankly, boring) updates about sunny suburbia over the phone. But most of the time, we sat in silence — the phone on speaker on my chest while I browsed the internet from bed, the only sounds coming from her mahjong computer game on the other end. We spent many hours alone, together.

After a couple months of these calls, it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the only one who found comfort in our shared silence. This buoyed my heart with so much affection that I began to end every phone call by doing something that, up until that point, had seemed unthinkable.

"I love you, Mom," I’d say.

"OK," she’d reply, as if she hadn’t heard me.

Growing up, I’d often seen my friends and their parents exchange "I love you"s. It seemed automatic, almost — easy. One close friend explained that she and her mother made sure to end every phone call with "I love you" because, in the event something were to happen to either one of them after the call, they didn’t want the last word between them to have been "bye." I found this incredibly morbid, but weirdly poetic.

It never really concerned me that my mom wasn’t particularly affectionate with her words. But I was always aware of the parallels; how my friend’s parents had seemed to be so much kinder, so much softer. As a child, I was accident-prone, constantly tripping and scraping my knees. But rather than kiss things better, my mom’s anxiety would cancel out her motherly instincts, her hands shaking as she silently cleaned the wounds and smothered them in ointment before covering me in bandages.

The first time my mom said "I love you" back to me, she said it in a joking voice — as if making fun of the very idea of saying it.

"Why’d you say it like that?" I asked.

"It’s just such a silly thing," she said. "It’s not how parents talk to their kids. My whole life, my father only gave me one compliment. One."

When I was a teenager, my mom and I would fight — often. I can’t remember over what, but I do remember that these fights were loud and frequent and that I regret most of them.

We are both fiercely independent and stubborn people, loud and unabashed when it comes to standing our ground and defending our opinions. My father wasn’t around to keep the peace, and I am my mother’s only child, so when I was a teenager, we were almost always alone. Our relationship was volatile and constantly switching between extremes.

Something that came up often when we were fighting was respect. For my mother, the youngest daughter in a traditional Chinese family, "love" for one’s parents was indistinguishable from respect — and our arguments were the ultimate sign of my disobedience.

"I should have raised you to be more scared of me," she yelled once.

"I’m terrified of you," I yelled back.

When I left for college, it was after four years of these fights. In many ways, I felt closer and more grateful for her than I’d ever been — more aware of all that she’d done for me, how hard she’d worked — but I’d also never felt further away.

With time, my mom began to entertain my attempts at getting her to say "I love you." But it was never consistent.

"I love you, Mom," I’d say.

"Bye," she’d say, before forgetting to hang up.

My mother never told me she loved me with words, but in retrospect, she told me in other ways. She was always the Monica to my Brandy when we’d sing "The Boy Is Mine." She pretended the car was a rollercoaster when we went over speed bumps on the drive to elementary school. She walked me through the New York hustle in our living room, our socked feet sliding on the rug as we danced. She patiently taught me the words to all the songs she’d loved growing up — and together we reached the high notes of Aretha Franklin and the low croon of Bobbie Gentry on laserdisc karaoke.

"You make me feel like a natural woman," I sang at eight years old.

"Today, Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," I sang at nine.

My mom single-handedly kept me fed, kept me in school, and supported me through all of my hobbies — from the ones that went somewhere (writing) to the ones that didn’t (toddler ballet). She made sure that, no matter how little money we had, we scraped together enough to go on a trip once a year so that I could see the world, so that I wouldn’t be stuck in one place. She taught me my culture, she sent me to Saturday school to learn Mandarin, and she protected me as best she could, whenever she could.

"I love you," these things said, time and time again.

But I couldn’t hear.

On our phone calls, the actual "I love you"s never got less cheesy — but with time, my mom seemed to relish the fun of it. To her, the whole thing was a joke, often at my expense.

"Love ya, hun," she’d say, and I’d laugh, because I love my mom so much that sometimes I can’t stand it.

My love for my mom is a ruthless affection, born from respect and fear and gratitude. She doesn’t believe this, of course, because she can’t fathom the word "love" meaning anything other than "unrelenting obedience." We still fight sometimes — and when we fight, we are cruel and unkind to one another, and when the words tumble out of our mouths, I know that we mean them. Sometimes, she mistakes my concern for something else. Sometimes, I’m not allowed to come home.

But there are also moments where I realize how much she’s taught me about love — real, intangible, relentless, and unconditional love. And I know now that the ways she tells me this are much louder than words could ever be.

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